Excerpt from
csmonitor.com
Vikings may have been family men who traveled with their wives to new lands, according to a new study of ancient Viking DNA.
Maternal
DNA from ancient Norsemen closely matches that of modern-day people in
the North Atlantic isles, particularly from the Orkney and Shetland Islands.
The findings suggest that both Viking men
and women sailed on the ships to colonize new lands. The new study also
challenges the popular conception of Vikings as glorified hoodlums with
impressive seafaring skills.
“It overthrows this 19th century idea that the Vikings were
just raiders and pillagers,” said study co-author Erika Hagelberg, an
evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo in Norway. “They established settlements and grew crops, and trade was very, very important.”
Vikings hold a special place in folklore as
manly warriors who terrorized the coasts of France, England and Germany
for three centuries. But the Vikings were much more than pirates and
pillagers. They established far-flung trade routes, reached the shores of present-day America, settled in new lands and even founded the modern city of Dublin, which was called Dyfflin by the Vikings.
Some earlier genetic studies have suggested that Viking males traveled alone and then brought local women along when they settled in a new location. For instance, a 2001 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggested that Norse men brought Gaelic women over when they colonized Iceland.
Modern roots
To
learn more about Norse colonization patterns, Hagelberg and her
colleagues extracted teeth and shaved off small wedges of long bones
from 45 Norse skeletons that were dated to between A.D. 796 and A.D.
1066. The skeletons were first unearthed in various locations around
Norway and are now housed in the Schreiner Collection at the University
of Oslo.
The team looked at DNA carried in the mitochondria, the
energy powerhouses of the cell. Because mitochondria are housed in the
cytoplasm of a woman’s egg, they are passed on from a woman to her
children and can therefore reveal maternal lineage. The team compared
that material with mitochondrial DNA from 5,191 people from across Europe, as well as with previously analyzed samples from 68 ancient Icelanders.
The
ancient Norse and Icelandic genetic material closely matched the
maternal DNA in modern North Atlantic people, such as Swedes, Scots and
the English. But the ancient Norse seemed most closely related to people
from Orkney and Shetland Islands, Scottish isles that are quite close to Scandinavia.
Mixed group
“It
looks like women were a more significant part of the colonization
process compared to what was believed earlier,” said Jan Bill, an
archaeologist and the curator of the Viking burial ship collection at the Museum of Cultural History, a part of the University of Oslo.
That
lines up with historical documents, which suggest that Norse men, women
and children — but also Scottish, British and Irish families —
colonized far-flung islands such as Iceland, Bill told Live Science.
Bill was not involved with the new study.
“This picture that we
have of Viking raiding — a band of long ships plundering — there
obviously would not be families on that kind of ship,” Bill said. “But
when these raiding activities started to become a more permanent thing,
then at some point you may actually see families are traveling along and
staying in the camps.”
As a follow-up, the team would like to
compare ancient Norse DNA to ancient DNA from Britain, Scotland and the
North Atlantic Isles, to get a better look at exactly how all these
people are related, Hagelberg said.
The findings were published today (Dec. 7) in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
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Did viking men bring their wives along? Viking men may have brought their wives with them to colonize new lands, a new DNA study suggests
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